Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  “Ah. So, what you are saying is that—”

  “Shut up. I am not finished.”

  But he is. He suddenly brightens.

  “I am just popping outside to see if there are any interesting-looking hookers. Want to come?”

  “I’m good.”

  He wriggles his way out of the booth and waddles out the front door.

  There is, if course, a terrible flaw in his analysis. Taleb’s proposition extends well beyond events at the tail end of a normal distribution. What he talked about was the consequences of an unusual event far exceeding its statistical rarity. Yes, I am reasonably sure, maybe, perhaps, possibly that the sky will stop falling on my head soon. But the residue might linger—dark foul-smelling ectoplasm dripping down from the crown of my head. A dead ex-wife. A dead daughter, struck down by an unknown disease. A son stealing to feed a drug habit. A beloved father in the Florida prison system until he dies. There is no return from these consequences. There is no reversion to the mean.

  Farzad comes back, slides in.

  “There is a wildly attractive creature down the block who is, I suspect, a man with breasts and a vagina, masquerading as a male homosexual with transsexual tendencies. I am excited. Purely academically, you understand. Would you like to have a look?”

  “That’s the problem with you Arabs or Persians or whatever the fuck you are. You see one man with a twat or woman with a dick and you get all overwrought. You were brought up in a dark, repressed society where you masturbated to American lingerie ads. You are a sick man, Farzad.”

  “Yes, well, little friend of misfortune, at least I had a dick to wank. Yours was like an adolescent pimple. Only worth a quick disgusting squeeze between two index fingers. I tremble with revulsion at the thought. Another Sling?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER 35

  JIM CALLS THE next morning.

  “CEO wants you back at work. He says that unless you can produce a doctor’s certificate, you must come back now—you’ve had enough time.”

  “Uh huh. Did you tell him I have some serious family issues that I am dealing with?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell him that I can shut his company down with a couple of lines of well-placed code?”

  “No. And don’t even joke about things like that.”

  “Tell him I will come in now.”

  “He also wants to see an audit trail of the SAP transfers to the bank because he intends to sue them for negligence.”

  “Of course he does.”

  I go to the bathroom and stare dully at myself in the mirror. I think to myself: this man has a business to run, I am a small but important cog in his wheel, why shouldn’t he want me back? Why should my personal problems, manifest though they are, interest him? Why should I feel volcanic rage against a man who, by all accounts, has climbed the capitalist mountain, has supplied where there was demand, has been the catalyst for thousands of jobs and aspirations?

  I go into the kitchen and drink two bottles of water. I get dressed in some of my less-favored threads and head out. I stop at the 7-11 to buy a large bottle of water and drink it in the car.

  I pop my head into Jim’s office. “Back at my station, Jim.”

  “Thanks, Meyer. It avoids a possibly awkward situation.”

  “Yes, it does. We wouldn’t want that, would we? Is he in?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  I head up to his inner sanctum on the tenth floor, a self-contained private suite of offices, with two personal assistants, a private bathroom, and possibly other hidden recesses in which secret handshakes and virgin sacrifices are offered. I poke my head into the reception area, which is sumptuously decorated with fine art and finer furniture (dark and heavy, smelling of expensive wood and oil), their splendor and excellence testament to his ability to hire the best art buyers and interior decorators that money can buy. A stern-looking older woman, with severe facelift syndrome and hair so tightly pulled back that she looks like an onion, is peering earnestly into her oversized flatscreen monitor.

  “Hello, Gretchen.”

  “Hello, Mr. Meyer.”

  “What’s happening, Gretch?”

  She stares at me with open contempt.

  “Can I help you, Mr. Meyer?”

  “You know that you are the only person who calls me Mr. Meyer? I mean the only person in the world. The known world, that is. Everyone else calls me Meyer. Even your boss. It signals lack of formality, amicability, trust, friendship even. Yo, Meyer, how ya doin’. That sort of thing. Don’t you prefer it when I call you Gretch? Doesn’t it make you feel warmly toward me, like perhaps, if the circumstances were just right, we might, perhaps, well, you know, exchange phone numbers? A great and ultimately tragic love affair between the knowing older woman who knows what she wants, has been there, has the experience and maturity, and the flighty, hard-bodied, irresponsible but lovable devil-may-care young programmer.”

  She stares at me, expressionless.

  “Can I help you, Mr. Meyer?”

  I give up. But I will crack her open one day, I swear. Like an oyster. And there I will find a pearl.

  “Is the boss in?”

  She stares at me hard. I wonder suddenly whether she has wild secret vices. Dominatrix comes to mind. Or even an alter ego, a submissive, dressed in diapers, mewling for mercy. Perhaps, in a less extreme vein, she does archery or tango on weekends, or, God, yes, maybe she roars the blues with whiskey-stained vocal chords.

  “He is on the phone to Dubai. I will make an appointment for you, Mr. Meyer, but he is very busy. Perhaps at the end of next week? What is it regarding?”

  I take a long swig of my fourth bottle of water in an hour and place the bottle down on her desk and smile. I turn and walk up to his door.

  “MR. MEYER!” Her voice leaps up an octave.

  I open the door and walk into the CEO’s office. I close it softly behind me, lock it from the inside, and turn to face the CEO who is sitting at his outsized desk, but with his chair swiveled around, so that his back is to me. He is yelling into his handset.

  “FUCK HIM. CHOKE OFF THEIR AIR SUPPLY. TODAY! GOT IT?”

  I have little idea what this is all about, but surmise with a great degree of confidence that he is talking to an underling, and that someone, somewhere, is due to lose his livelihood soon, home and family. I assume that this is the normal consequence of the lack of an air supply.

  He slams down the handset and swivels around, seemingly surprised to see me standing there.

  My bladder is close to bursting.

  “MEYER! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? YOU MAKE AN APPOINTMENT BEFORE YOU COME IN HERE! NOW GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!”

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “WHAT?” His face is rage and confusion.

  “My bladder is really full. I drank too much water. I need to go to the bathroom. Can I use your bathroom?”

  I motion to a door off his gargantuan office.

  “THAT IS FOR THE CEO ONLY. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”

  There is just the slightest hint of bewilderment in his voice. A tiny crack in his armor as he tries to understand the color of the insubordination standing at his door.

  “Please can I use your bathroom?”

  He stares at me uncertainly. There is large blood vessel pumping furiously at his temple. He reverts to type.

  “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE BEFORE I FIRE YOU.”

  In one fast movement, my zip is down and my dick is out. I walk quickly to his desk, holding my dick in one hand, and my phone in the other, video camera rolling. His eyes grow large. His mouth is open, but no voice comes out. Clearly, they don’t teach this in asshole school.

  And then I let loose. A long yellow massively powered stream arcs forward, driven by a distended bladder and righteous fury. He tries to jump up, but not fast enough to escape a direct hit on his expensive shirt. I jump onto the desk now, the stream painfully halted by the
exertion. I turn, feet planted wide and shoulders thrown back, and aim again and manage a direct blow to the side of his head as he tries to get to the door.

  And even as I am doing this, I am imagining more, much more—exquisite tortures and humiliations for which this, an arguably masterful performance in its own right, is merely the prelude. The leaden events that now surround and threaten me are rendered silent, their eyes downcast and vanquished in the face of my comic Zeus, as I mete out justice and balance against my tormentors, of which the CEO stands proxy. Given time and money and determination this would be a pallid beginning of many splendid plagues upon his head and all others who choose to cross my lines in sand, even in their windswept disguise.

  “FUCK! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? STOP IT. GRETCHEN!”

  From my perch on the desk I am now able to leap toward him as he reaches the door. He tries to open it and, finding it locked, whips around, face white. I am on him again, close enough to soak his pants as he stumbles toward his bathroom. My urine is now wetting carpets, walls, books, photos (I am thrilled to see a picture of the CEO and Donald Rumsfeld, taken at some ass-licking corporate-government contribution fest, become artistically splattered). Great parabolic waves of piss, like an Olympic sport involving ribbons and the mathematics of gravity, rise and fall in terrible retribution.

  As he reaches the bathroom and flings opens the door, a final heroic surge catches him square on the ass, creating a serendipitous Zorro-like zigzag.

  The bathroom door slams shut. I finish up my load on his desk and chair. I turn to the bathroom door. I can hear shocked silence behind it.

  “Jeez. Sorry, boss. I’ll use the employee bathroom, shall I? Oh, and I quit. Keep the severance pay—use it to buy a new suit. Oh, and I may post this on YouTube. We’ll see how it goes.”

  I unlock the door, walk out. Gretchen, who has been trying to get in from the other side, stares at me, eyes wide.

  “I always liked you, Gretch. Too bad, we could have made beautiful music together.”

  And then I am out of there, my load lightened, metaphorically and physically.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE UNIVERSE APPLAUDS.

  Isobel’s temperature stabilizes, the doctors start to pack up their gear and move on to more pressing problems.

  My father agrees to the dictates of the justice system and moves back into the facility, car keys and gun now firmly behind lock and key.

  “Great news, Dad. You came to your senses then?”

  “Pah.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Pah’?”

  “I got irritated in there. Everybody’s very angry with everybody else. You’d think with three square meals, a TV room, and access to books they would lighten up a little. But no, everybody wants to stab everyone else. Plus there are no women.”

  “So what now?”

  “Back to the same old.”

  “C’mon, Dad, it’s not that bad.”

  “I’m gonna break out of here and take a cruise to Jamaica, meet a girl, fall in love, get married, have some kids.”

  “Ha.”

  “How are you doing there on the coast?”

  “Good, Dad. I pissed on my boss yesterday.”

  “Ah, that’s good. How?”

  “By pissing on him.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Why?”

  “He pissed me off. See the pun?”

  “You really, really pissed on him?”

  “Yup.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He hid in the bathroom.”

  “I assume you no longer have a job.”

  “Correct.”

  “Won’t he press charges?”

  “For what? Urine assault? Besides, I videotaped it—I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want it on the Internet.”

  “Such pride I feel for my son. What a little puissant. See the pun?”

  “Better than shooting at people.”

  “No, it’s not. Well, maybe it is.”

  “You really want to go on a cruise? I’ll take you.”

  “Not really. Besides, you’re now unemployed.”

  “I’m fine. I’m a pretty smart guy.”

  “You are. That’s why you’re my son.”

  “I am glad you’re not in lockup, Dad. Promise me you won’t pull a stunt like that again.”

  “No can do, kiddo. I have plans.”

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you too, my boy.”

  I put down the phone. I am weeping.

  CHAPTER 37

  THE UNIVERSE STOPS applauding.

  Grace dies.

  Things just shut down, I am told. They don’t fully understand—some people wake up. Some vegetate. Some die. This seems to me to be a massive failing of science, civilization, the cosmos, somefuckingthing. Why don’t they know? Why can’t they fix this? Why do good people die? Why is it necessary to devastate my beautiful son, who is now catatonic with grief on a sofa in my house on the hill, dully watching reality shows with veined eyes. Who’s in charge here, for fuck’s sake? Don’t they understand the concept of fair play? Rules? Balance? Justice? You don’t just snuff out people for no good fucking reason. Especially if I am about to fall in love with them again. Especially when I should never have left them in the first place. My grief and anger battle for dominance, and I oscillate between the two, finding myself alternatively raging and crying, sometimes both.

  There are many things to be done. Grace has no relatives here, other than Innocent, and the extent of his competence now is to move from bed to living room and back. So I brace myself. I call the attorney we used when we were married. A small break—he has remained on her payroll, and there is a current will, which mandates that all effects go to Innocent, which is good, even in the face of her relative penury. I try to get Innocent to help me go through her things, but he is near autistic with shock.

  I gain access to her apartment using Innocent’s key and I gingerly open cupboards and drawers and cabinets. I rifle through physical files (neat, labeled, symmetrical) and computer files (a complete shambles of digital disorder). The apartment is riven with her smell, the perfumes and oils of a lifetime of personal pride and private grooming. I open her underwear drawer, stare, close it again before my thoughts stray, sick with longing. There are old photo albums under the bed and I cannot bear to open them, but I put them in my briefcase, their melancholy secrets unexamined.

  After six hours’ intruding on a life now absent, the final tally is barely legible, with few possessions of material value—a car (now a heap without function, like Grace’s body in the morgue), clothes, old furniture, books, $15,000 in savings, no insurance, a small dildo (carefully and sadly entombed in a paper bag and disposed of in a far-off trash can) and a treasure trove of echoes and ghosts. And then there is the codicil to the will, which is that Grace should be buried in Zimbabwe, under the heated sun that nurtured her youth and strength.

  My dread is gone and I want it back. Its promise is now born and animated, fulfilled and writ large and black with loss and grieving. It makes me wish for the good old days, when disquiet and anxiety were my companions with whom I could argue and bicker, parry and thrust.

  But there is no arguing with this.

  The whole Zimbabwe thing, while pregnant (or freighted) with metaphysical gravitas on some level, is a pain in the ass. I have never cleaved to notions of final resting place. I have never visited my mother’s grave. It is sand, mud, and long-decomposed flesh. Her memories, although faded, are much more fertile ground for me. With this request of Grace there are now official documents and coffins and air tickets and bureaucracies and health certificates, and the prospect of sharing intimacies and paperwork with representatives of an awful, incompetent, brutal buffoon-ridden regime. And worst of all, a sad and worn mother, and a lonely and dying father whose last handhold to life and laughter has now crumbled.

  And me? Fuck, if I were a stumbling, clueless, lost, bewildered, and b
emused fool before, I am the same, without the bemused bit. There is nothing to be bemused about. Amused about. Replace bemused with poleaxed. Numbed with all manner of heavyweight blows. Uncomprehending and sad, so very, very sad. There is death in my face. There is a shattered son, now reverted to a little child. Sobbing. Asking himself why. Asking his daddy why.

  Oh, and I am also possibly facing assault charges, although Van disagrees.

  “Meyer, you know my family was very rich, right?”

  “You think?”

  “And my dad was a big cheese and had powerful friends?”

  “Indeed.”

  “My father would have ripped his tongue out before facing public humiliation. Even if he could, after the fact, have exacted exquisite revenge.”

  “I see where you’re going.”

  “Mr. CEO doesn’t want to be on YouTube drinking your piss. So you are in the clear as far as assault charges are concerned.”

  “I concur. You affirm me, Van. This is the meaning of friendship.”

  “However, he is also likely to be arranging to have you quietly killed.”

  “Shit. Can he do that?”

  “Polonium. All the most fashionable intelligence agencies use it these days.”

  “Fuck. You think?”

  “No, not really. Having you beaten to within an inch of your miserable life is more likely.”

  “Fuck again.”

  “How are you?”

  “Sad, Van. Very sad.”

  “Want to get stoned?”

  “No.”

  “Want to get drunk?”

  “Maybe. Actually, no.”

  “Want to hear some crush-your-testicles Bulgarian lesbian close-harmony choir?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  * * *

  Farzad has another view, as always. We are ensconced on his deck, watching the sun plunge bruised and bloody into the Pacific.

  “Loss.”

  “Huh?”

  “You are dealing with a terrible loss.”

  “Thanks, Farzad, that’s very perceptive.”

  “You think this is a problem?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “You think you’re the first person to deal with loss?”